Longhorn brothers Johnson, Nader bonded by heart

Ticking right alongIn rising above their physical maladies, Gary Johnson and Matt Nader have shown University of Texas fans how much heart they have

MIKE FINGER, AUSTIN BUREAU

Published 6:30 am, Monday, February 14, 2011

Photo: Michael Thomas, ALL

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An integral part of a Texas team ranked third in the nation, Gary Johnson has been on the Big 12 commissioner's academic honor roll four times.

An integral part of a Texas team ranked third in the nation, Gary Johnson has been on the Big 12 commissioner's academic honor roll four times.

Photo: Michael Thomas, ALL

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UT strength and conditioning coach Todd Wright, left, became a father figure to Gary Johnson.

UT strength and conditioning coach Todd Wright, left, became a father figure to Gary Johnson.

Photo: UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS ATHLETICS PHOTOGRAPHY

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His playing career over, Matt Nader is learning the ropes of the coaching profession.

His playing career over, Matt Nader is learning the ropes of the coaching profession.

Photo: Courtesy Photo

Longhorn brothers Johnson, Nader bonded by heart

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AUSTIN — Inside one heart, recesses the size of jellybeans covered a wall that should have been solid. Inside another, electrical impulses gone haywire caused the ventricles to quiver instead of pump. Both organs were destined to fail.

These are the details we usually discover after tragedies.

A father holds a son in his arms and cannot find a pulse. A grandson looks at a sick grandmother and fears he will let her down.

These are the scenes that rarely lead to happy endings.

Four years ago, a pair of stories conceivably bound for anguish and despair converged on a college campus. Gary Johnson and Matt Nader enrolled at Texas with little in common except bodies built for athletic excellence, unseen afflictions threatening their ability to achieve it, and hearts broken in more than one sense of the word.

But somehow, over time, two distinct beats emerged. Hemoglobin flowed to all the right places, and hope did the same. Where before there had been chaos and abnormality, there was rhythm.

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There was circulation.

There was life.

The roads from Acres Homes

When Johnson was a boy, long before he knew anything about arrhythmia or EKGs, Dorothy McClenon told him he had to have heart. The way she saw it, a kid growing up in Acres Homes had no choice.

Like many of his friends in the Houston neighborhood where he grew up, Johnson learned at an early age how difficult it would be to get out. His parents were young when he was born, and although they remain a part of his life to this day, it was decided during his infancy that if Johnson had any hope of making it, it would be with McClenon, his grandmother.

She did all she could, but she couldn’t keep up with him every hour of the day, especially with that nonstop motor he had in his chest. And in the evenings on the streets where Johnson played, he began really paying attention.

“You start noticing that certain people have things you want,” Johnson said. “And then you start to wonder how they got it.”

One day in the sixth grade, he learned a lesson he didn’t want. He was handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car, and Johnson admits now he probably deserved it. But the officer relented and turned him loose, leaving Johnson vowing to find a better way.

He found it on the basketball court. Not only was he big and strong, but he possessed a boundless energy that Zeke Smith noticed right away. Smith is the head coach at Aldine High School, but he makes a habit of regularly checking out the kids at the feeder middle schools.

When he spotted Johnson as a seventh-grader, it turned out to be not just a meeting of a coach and star player.

“He accepted me as a father,” Smith said. “And I accepted him as a son.”

Johnson, yearning for a paternal influence, started spending more and more time at his coach’s house. When Smith drove him home, Johnson would stay inside with his grandmother until Smith came back to pick him up. Midway through high school, Smith arranged for Johnson to be baptized.

“I told him, ‘It’s kids like you that make it,’ ” Smith said. “ ‘You don’t have life laid out for you. You’re going to appreciate things.’ ”

Eventually, scholarship offers rolled in, some from as far away as Arizona. But during Johnson’s junior year of high school, McClenon was diagnosed with breast cancer. There was no way Johnson would go any farther than UT.

He arrived in Austin in the summer of 2007, the jewel of Rick Barnes’ latest recruiting class. But when Johnson underwent the battery of medical tests the Longhorns require of their incoming athletes, startling information turned up in an ultrasound of his heart.

The walls of the organ never fully formed. He had a rare disease called non-compaction syndrome, which meant he might never be cleared to play basketball again.

At the time, Johnson trusted no one at UT. If he wasn’t going to be on the basketball team, there was a good chance he’d soon be back in Acres Homes, where he’d been told time and time again that the only two ways for a man to make it were by playing sports or by more illicit means. And if sports were out? And if McClenon was still sick?

“There’s a million thoughts going through your head,” Johnson said. “I started thinking, ‘Am I going to end up on that other path?’ ”

From Westlake to the brink

For Nader, finding the right path was never a problem. Finding a team was.

In the sixth grade, he already stood 6 feet tall and weighed more than 200 pounds, and the Austin Westlake youth football league wouldn’t let him play because he was too big. Instead, his parents, Paul Nader and Barbara Bergin — both doctors — drove him to Dripping Springs several times per week so he could overpower the kids there.

By the time he reached high school, Nader was a stunning mix of speed and strength, and he became the only sophomore to start on Westlake’s varsity squad in 2004. College scouts had him pegged as one of the top offensive linemen in the state, and few doubted he’d succeed.

He certainly didn’t.

“All I knew was football,” Nader said. “I was going to play in the NFL, and I was going to use the University of Texas as a vehicle to get there.”

But early during Nader’s senior year of high school, a bad omen arrived in the form of a bee sting. His hand swelled to the size of a grapefruit just days before Westlake was to play A&M Consolidated in College Station, and he felt terrible all week.

It was unbearably hot and humid at Tigerland Stadium that night, and Nader’s Chaparrals bullied Consolidated throughout a grueling 16-play touchdown drive that took up the entire first quarter.

Dripping in sweat, the 6-7, 310-pound Nader came off the field asking for ice towels.

“I felt like a grenade exploded in my chest,” he said.

He fell backward off the bench, and soon other fans in the grandstands were calling his parents’ names. The elder Nader and Bergin raced down to the bench, instinctively checking for a pulse.

There wasn’t one.

They cut his jersey off, pulled off the shoulder pads and began CPR, with Paul Nader on chest compressions and Bergin on mouth-to-mouth. Soon other doctors in the crowd joined them, and one began to hook up the automated external defibrillator (AED) Westlake had on hand. Then Paul Nader noticed his son was taking the shallow, irregular breaths known as agonal respiration.

“It’s the kind of breathing you have right before you die,” he said.

The younger Nader said he remembers the lights of the stadium fading out.

A few minutes later, 100 miles away in Houston, UT coach Mack Brown was having dinner with his staff the night before a game against Rice. Suddenly, his offensive line coach, Mac McWhorter, came running to him with a cell phone in his hands and an icy look on his face.

“Matt Nader just died,” McWhorter said.

Finding balance

Johnson can’t even remember which hospital it was. He’d been in and out of a dizzying gantlet of them during those first few months of college, but this was the first time he’d woken up with a catheter injecting chemicals into his body.

It was part of a procedure doctors used to speed up his heartbeat to levels he wouldn’t experience even during the most strenuous of exercise. Given the option to sleep through the entire ordeal, Johnson said he wanted to be awake.

“I always like to know what’s going on,” he said.

Back then, not even some of the best heart specialists in the world could say for sure what the problem was. Johnson’s malady, which involves the incomplete formation of the walls in his heart, is a relatively new discovery in the medical world. Frustrated by the lack of information, he did some research of his own on the Internet.

“One site said the biggest red flag is sudden death,” Johnson said. “Not much you can do with that.”

Isolation made matters worse. He couldn’t practice with his team and gained 25 pounds. Coaches tried to reach out, but he struggled to accept help. One day, he told his academic counselor he’d never trusted a white person before.

Gradually, though, he learned to trust Longhorns strength and conditioning coach Todd Wright, whom he calls his “father figure” at UT. With his future uncertain, Johnson stood before Wright and slashed open a vein of emotion.

“He was devastated,” Wright said. “I could see his mind going to different places. That’s a lot to deal with as a young man.”

Then, just before the Longhorns’ 2007-08 season was about to begin, Johnson received the glorious news he’d been praying for. Doctors, satisfied with months of test results, cleared him to play basketball. He had to sign a waiver absolving UT of responsibility in the case of something catastrophic, and he had to submit to close monitoring by the UT training staff as well as extensive regular testing at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston, but he was back.

“I wasn’t going to take it for granted,” Johnson said.

His attitude soared. The motor first noticed by Smith, his high school coach, was running hotter than ever. A 6-6 forward with toughness and skill, Johnson became an integral part of a team that made the Elite Eight.

And ultimately, a metamorphosis took place. The quiet, untrusting kid became a pillar of confidence, an excellent student named four times to the Big 12 commissioner’s honor roll, and the unquestioned senior leader of a team now ranked No. 3 in the country.

“He’s grown to understand he’s more than just a basketball player,” Wright said. “He’s found balance in his life.”

Embracing a 2nd chance

As it turned out, Mac McWhorter had been misinformed. Matt Nader was still alive.

Without the quick medical attention and the use of the AED, he wouldn’t have been. Nader suffered from ventricular fibrillation, in which electrical impulses create an abnormal rhythm of the heart. In Nader’s case, it resulted in cardiac arrest.

Within a week, he had an internal defibrillator implanted in his chest. Doctors told him he could never play football again. But Brown, the UT coach, told his parents the Longhorns’ scholarship offer stood.

“No matter what, he’s going to be a Longhorn,” Brown said. “The day he committed to us, we committed to him.”

This was a relief in one sense, but it didn’t offer total solace.

In his head, Matt Nader hadn’t given up football yet. He arrived at UT with the rest of the freshmen in the summer of 2007 and decided he wanted to join them in conditioning drills.

“I can still run,” Nader said. “Let’s just see if this works out.”

It didn’t. A couple of weeks into the workouts, Nader was in the middle of a sprint at Royal-Memorial Stadium when he collapsed at the 50-yard line. He’d gone into cardiac arrest again, and the internal defibrillator had saved him.

But this time there was no denying his career was over.

So he threw himself into coaching. McWhorter and Brown gave him responsibilities as a student assistant, and he shed 60 pounds because he didn’t need bulk to break down game film. With Nader sitting in on coaching meetings and helping linemen with their footwork, UT won 40 games in four years.

“When you lose your identity as a player, it’s a very difficult thing,” Brown said. “But he made a great transition. The kids are drawn to him.”

It isn’t just football players who find Nader magnetic. Shortly after his first cardiac arrest, he was invited by Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst to address the Texas Legislature. He gave a similar speech to the University Interscholastic League, and soon AEDs were required at all high school athletic events.

For the past four years, Nader has traveled the country giving speeches advocating AEDs and CPR training and talking to other young heart patients. When he graduates this spring with a degree in corporate communications, he wants to sell cardiac devices for a living.

And if he could trade all he’s become for a life as a football star he wanted so desperately to be? He’d turn it down.

“At this point, it would be impossible to take back,” Nader said. “It’s who I am.”

A shared bond

Two semesters ago, Johnson and Nader walked into a classroom together. One man’s flawed heart still allowed him to chase his old dream. The other’s had given him a new one.

They’d known each other only as casual acquaintances until then, but one day after class Nader asked Johnson about his condition. It was awkward at first, but a connection was made.

“Matt’s my man,” Johnson said.

Nader’s success with his backup plan has given Johnson another reason to believe he could make it without sports. A social work major, Johnson said he’d like to return to a place like Acres Homes — where his grandmother has recently beaten her breast cancer — in a different capacity someday.

“It’s like being part of the problem when you’re from where I’m from,” Johnson said. “And now it’s like being on the other side.”

Dr. Mark Chassay, UT’s head basketball physician, said Johnson’s future as a heart patient remains uncertain. Because non-compaction syndrome has been found in several patients who’ve died in middle age, some researchers suggest it might become standard practice for everyone with the malady to undergo a heart transplant by the age of 40.

But Chassay said trying to predict if that will happen is futile. After all, there’s no way of knowing what kind of progress hundreds of heart researchers will make in 20 years.

LONGHORN BROTHERS BONDED BY HEART

Matt Nader's heart, which has a problem handling electric impulses, went into ventricular fibrillation during a game in 2006. Gary Johnson's heart suffers from a congenital issue called non-compaction syndrome.

VENTRICULAR FIBRILLATION

»Uncontrolled twitchingof the heart muscle fibers in the lower chambers of the heart.

»Heart rhythmbecomes severely irregular.

»Blood is not removedfrom the heart, causing sudden cardiac death.

»Most common causeis a heart attack, but it can be caused by other heart disorders, defects or when the heart does not receive enough oxygen.

»Causes sudden collapseor unconsciousness due to lack of blood to the brain and other muscles. Other symptoms: chest pain, nausea, rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, and dizziness.

»Emergency treatmentuses CPR and an external defibrillator to shock the heartbeat to a normal rhythm.

»Long-term treatment:Implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) that monitors heart rhythm and sends electrical signals to reset the rhythm as necessary may be needed to prevent future attacks. Medicine may be used.